Germany, Israel to fund J'lem brain research center

Hebrew University, Max Planck Society to build a new brain research center to serve as teaching, research facility in the field.

brain.
(photo credit:Wikicommons)

A brain research center costing 3 million euro during its first five years of
existence will be established by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Max
Planck Society, an independent non-governmental and nonprofit association of
German research institutes publicly funded by Germany’s federal and state
governments.

It will be established on the the university’s Givat Ram
campus in the capital, where the signing ceremony will be held on January 9. The
two sides will fund it equally, and Hebrew University president Prof. Menahem
Ben-Sasson and German Ambassador Andreas Michaelis will participate.

The
new center will work in cooperation with the Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for
Brain Sciences, which will soon start construction of a large teaching and
research facility in the field.

It will be ninth research center to be
funded with German money outside the country and the first to specialize in
brain research. The university said the facility is sure to bolster
German-Israeli cooperation in the sciences.

Ben-Sasson said Tuesday that
cooperative research with Germany is one of the most important and fruitful
conducted here. It is hoped that the research will increase basic scientific
understanding of genes, neurons and neural networks, and lead to improved
treatment for destructive neurological diseases.